Love Me Tinder

Until recently, hookup apps were straightforward but sleazy. Then along came Tinder, the dating-hookup hybrid that made things simpler, sexier, and particularly lady-friendly. In just fifteen months, it seems to have cracked the code and caught fire. Here's how Tinder won the sex-app arms race

That fall, his relationship of two and a half years finally ended, and Eli found himself single again. He was 27 years old, losing the vestigial greenness of his youth. He wanted to have sex with some women, and he wanted some stories to tell. He updated his dating profiles. He compiled his photos. He experimented with taglines. He downloaded all the apps. He knew the downsides—the perfidy of the deceptive head shot, the seductress with the intellect of a fence post—but he played anyway. He joined every free dating service demographically available to him.

Around the same time, somewhere across town, a woman named Katherine**1 ** shut down her OkCupid account. She had approached Internet dating assertively, had checked the box that read Short-term dating and the one that read Casual sex. Then a casual encounter had turned menacing, and Katherine decided she no longer wanted to pursue sex with total strangers. But she had a problem: She liked the adventure, she had the usual human need for other humans, and she needed the convenience of meeting people online. Katherine was 37, newly single, with family obligations and a full-time job. Most of her friends were married. She needed something new.

When Katherine and Eli downloaded Tinder in October 2013, they joined millions of Americans interested in trying the fastest-growing mobile dating service in the country. Tinder does not give out statistics about the number of its users, but the app has grown from being the plaything of a few hundred Los Angeles party kids to a multinational phenomenon in less than a year. Unlike the robot yentas of yore (Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony), which out-competed one another with claims of compatibility algorithms and secret love formulas, the only promise Tinder makes is to show you the other users in your immediate vicinity. Depending on your feelings for these people, you swipe them to the left (meaning no thanks) or to the right (yes, please). Two people who swipe each other to the right will match. Your matches accrue in a folder, and often that’s the end of the story. Other times you start texting. The swiping phase is as lulling in its eye-glazing repetition as a casino slot machine, the chatting phase ideal for idle, noncommittal flirting. In terms of popularity, Tinder is a massive and undeniable success. Whether it works depends on your idea of working.

For Katherine, still wary from her bad encounter, Tinder offered another advantage. It uses your pre-existing Facebook network and shows which friends, if any, you have in common with the person in the photo. On October 16, Eli appeared on her phone. He was cute. He could tell a joke. (His tagline made her laugh.) They had one friend in common, and they both liked Louis C.K. (Who doesn’t like Louis C.K.? Eli says later. Oh, you also like the most popular comedian in America?) She swiped him to the right. Eli, who says he would hook up with anybody who isn’t morbidly obese or in the middle of a self-destructive drug relapse, swipes everyone to the right. A match!

He messaged first. Sixty-nine miles away?? he asked.

I’m at a wedding in New Jersey, she replied.

So, Eli said to himself, she’s lonely at a wedding in New Jersey.

Eli: So why you on Tinder?

Katherine: To date. You?

Eli said it was an esteem thing. It had taught him that women find me more attractive than I think. Unfortunately for Katherine, he told her he didn’t have a lot of time to date. He worked two jobs. They wanted different things. It therefore read as mock bravado when Eli wrote, But you ever just want to fuck please please holler at me cool??? He added his number.

Katherine waited an hour to respond. Then: Ha. And then, one minute later, I will. And: I kinda do.

Eli: Please please do. ;)

Katherine liked that he was younger. He was funny. He did not, like one guy, start the conversation with Don’t you want to touch my abs? He said please. Eli liked that Katherine was older. Katherine wrote: You can’t be psycho or I will tell [name of mutual friend]. He sympathized with that, too.

The parameters were clear. They arranged to meet.

I first signed up for Tinder in May but found it skewed too young. (I’m 32.) When I looked again in mid-October, everything had changed. I swiped through people I knew from college, people I might’ve recognized from the train. I saw it had gone global when a friend in England posted a Tinder-inspired poem on her Facebook page (and here are we, He and Me, our flat-screen selves rendered 3D). I started to check it regularly. The more I used it, the more I considered how much it would have helped me at other times in my life—to make friends in grad school, to meet people after moving to a new city. It seemed possible that one need never be isolated again.

In December, I flew out to Los Angeles, where Tinder is based, to visit the company’s offices and meet two of its founders, Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, both 27. (The third is Jonathan Badeen, the engineer who built the app.) Rad is the chief ecutive officer; Mateen is chief marketing officer. They are also best friends, share a resemblance to David Schwimmer, and have been known to show up for work in the same outfit. I was staying only a mile from Tinder’s offices in West Hollywood, and within forty-eight hours both founders showed up on my Tinder feed. Other memorable appearances on my feed in Los Angeles included a guy holding a koala bear, a guy and his Yorkshire terrier, in matching sweaters, and a pipe-smoking dandy with a Rasputin beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and a gold ring the exact shape and size of a cicada.

Rad and Mateen are local boys. They both grew up in Beverly Hills, although they attended different private schools. They first encountered each other at 14, when Sean made a play for Justin’s girlfriend. (We met because we both liked the same girl—but the girl was my girlfriend, says Justin.) They reconnected at USC, and then both started independent companies. Justin’s was a social network for celebrities. Sean’s was Adly, a platform that allows companies to advertise via celebrities’ social networks. He sold the majority of his stake in 2012. I didn’t want to be in the ad business, he says. He also didn’t want to make things for computers. Computers are going extinct, he says. Computers are just work devices. For people his age, the primary way to interface with the technical world was through a mobile device.

Rad and Mateen have shared business ideas with each other for years, and every idea begins with a problem. The key to solving the problem that interested Tinder: I noticed that no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them, says Sean. They had both experienced the frustration of sending smoke signals through social media. There are people that want to get to know you who don’t know you, so they’re resorting to Facebook, explains Justin. When those advances or friendings or followings are unwanted, they say, the overtures can seem a little creepy. (Consider, for example, the long-standing mystery of the Facebook poke.) Sean was interested in the idea of the double opt-in—some establishment of mutual interest that precedes interaction.

And so Tinder entered a fossilizing industry. Most of the big players (including Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, eHarmony, Manhunt, JDate, and Christian Mingle) established themselves before billions of humans carried miniature satellite-connected data processors in their pockets, before most people felt comfortable using their real names to seek companionship online, and before a billion people joined Facebook—before Facebook even existed. Tinder’s major advantages come from exploiting each of these recent developments. The company also managed to accrue, in less than a year of existence, the only truly important asset of any dating site: millions and millions of users.

Nicole is 30, a willowy brunette with curly hair who describes herself on Tinder as Dancey, smiley, lovey, tall. Like 60 tall. Since joining Tinder last summer, she has chatted with dozens of guys but only gone on two Tinder dates. In general, she thinks Tinder is hilarious.

Sometimes she’ll start Tindering while on the train and will get so distracted she’ll miss her stop. She finds she sometimes falls into a soothing swiping rhythm where she’s not really looking at the men, just calming herself with a repetitive pattern of left-right swipes. Getting a match seems to activate some primal-gratification center in her mind. She likes that it’s played like a game.

I’m definitely not the type of woman who walks around thinking that everyone thinks I’m hot, Nicole tells me. She does not feel like the people who want to date her are abundant and everywhere, so when a lot of matching happens, it comes as a real boost. It makes me look at my external world in a more favorable way, she says. When she’s bored, she goes on Tinder. When she wants validation, she finds it on Tinder. She uses it when she’s feeling down. (Tinder gets a slight uptick in use on Sundays, that day of hangovers, boredom, and planning.) Sending screenshots of the most ridiculous photos that come up has become a source of merriment for her and her friends. There seems to be a preponderance of men posing with tigers, she says.

Actually communicating with people is another story. I do a lot of not responding, which is probably horrible, politenesswise, she says. It takes an especially dynamic person to win her over at text messaging. The usual Hi, how are you? bores her. I’m a social worker, and I talk to people all day, she says. I’m not interested in someone’s How are you? question. Her two dates both persuaded her to go out by being really solid text conversationalists.

The dates were fine. They did not end in sex, unlike many of her first dates on OkCupid. Part of this was simply that expectations are so much lower on Tinder; all you know about the people in your folder is that your advances are welcome. The lack of stated purpose in each profile can lead to some confusion. In fact, many of the people I interviewed asked me what the site is supposed to be for. Some people, used to reading between the lines in such matters, simply assume casual sex. Not Nicole. I ask how she makes that clear, and she says she does not respond to messages that arrive at 3 A.M.

She has used the site both in New York, where she lives, and in the Bay Area, where she is from. She observes a clear difference. When she signed on in the Bay, she felt a flood of recognition: These are my people! she said. They’re on Tinder here! I ask what that means, and she says, More earthy, hipstery thirtysomething folks. She had more matches. They were all so cute and looked so friendly and warm and fun. But how does she distinguish that from people in New York? She describes a typical photo of a New Yorker as a selfie taken in a fancy lounge bathroom while wearing a suit.

As a college student, co-founder Justin Mateen perfected a system of party promotion. He would strike an agreement with a club to ensure a minimum of drink sales. He would hire a performer. Then he would enlist representatives from the fraternities and sororities of USC and UCLA to recruit people, promising a free ticket for every ten tickets sold from their houses and a monetary prize if they brought one hundred partygoers. He took a cut of sales—the more money the bar made, the bigger his cut. It was a good little gig until his parents began to bother him about it: We don’t want you to be a party thrower, they said.

But it helped, when Sean and Justin started Tinder, that Justin knew how to populate a party. They had disdain for traditional advertising; they wanted a new challenge. He wanted the app to catch on with the most difficult group of people—college students too young and socially active to need online dating, people who saw it as a stigmatized practice. He wanted people to join Tinder not because they saw an ad on Facebook but because they recognized its social value.

So Justin mined his contacts for models and sorority girls. Whitney Wolfe, Tinder’s vice president of marketing, remembers going to the Apple store and telling the guy behind the counter about Tinder and watching his eyes pop out as he began swiping through; there may have been only 200 people, she remembers, but they were 200 of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen.

In the beginning, Justin ran individual campaigns to encourage people to sign up. He would text each person personally. He targeted what he called social influencers, avoiding the awkward crowd of people probably most in need of a new way to make friends. Then he hit USC, enlisting the help of his younger brother and sister, who were students there. He launched Tinder on campus with a party for 300 USC students at his parents’ house.

He shows me a photo of it from Instagram: a pool in the sunshine, shirtless partygoers, lanterns, an inflatable slide. To his mother’s chagrin, he hung a giant Tinder banner from the roof. That was sixty-two weeks ago, he says, using Instagram’s preferred metric of time. A year and ten weeks after the pool party, the company claims to have made a half billion matches and registers 450 million swipes a day.

Inspired in part by the path of Facebook, which launched first at elite colleges, Justin turned not just to the Ivy League but to schools known for their good parties. After seeding USC, Justin and Whitney traveled to schools like SMU in Dallas. Whitney might stand on a table in a fraternity and announce that there were 200 hot sorority girls on the app waiting for the men to sign up, then run to the sorority and tell them the reverse. They left a trail of stickers behind them—in the best campus bars, in the most exclusive nightclubs.

I was in a sorority, so I knew how to get into the brains of sorority girls, says Whitney, who is now 24. Justin knew how to get into the brains and the pants of sorority girls. For colleges they did not visit, Justin hired a campus representative, usually the younger sibling of someone he knew from Los Angeles, several of them scions, all of them the most social and charismatic people he could find.

My interviews with Tinder’s employees took place half in their offices, half in the leather interiors of luxury cars or while descending in the elevator from brunch at Soho House or waiting for the valet in the gardenia-scented drive of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Justin and Sean grew up rich and popular in a city of surface and sheen. They have none of the affectations of Hollywood ecutives. (They wear flannel shirts and sneakers; their shared office is littered with Nerf gun darts.) Still, their acute understanding of the metrics of social status seems a product of their environment. Sean is the homebody of the two, preferring the company of his girlfriend of six months, Alexa, who is the daughter of Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell. They met on Tinder, and her friends call her Tinderella. Things get awkward at family functions when Sean opines that computers are dead.

Justin is more raffish. If he is less interested in having a serious relationship than Sean, it is because what genuinely seems to make him happiest is going out in the world, making new friends, and persuading them to download Tinder. His home, a spacious bungalow on the border of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, feels like a barely occupied hotel. (He selected his dining-room table because it reminded him of the lobby of the Delano South Beach in Miami.)

One day he had a lunch meeting with the producers of The Mindy Project, which will be putting Tinder in an upcoming episode, so I rode along with him. As I listened to him chat with his art consultants over Bluetooth in his black Mercedes SUV with its Tinder sticker on the spare tire, I wondered whether L.A.’s VIP-obsessed culture had something to do with the company’s exponential growth. It’s difficult to imagine Tinder coming from Silicon Valley. The key to Tinder—the double opt-in—is an idea born of real-world experience (this is what you want in a bar—to know that the person you want to hit on wants you to hit on him or her) as opposed to sophisticated computer metrics. For once in the tech world, the socially gifted are leading the socially stunted.

Ben messaged me first. He was interesting, because his tagline said, Tall, dominant man seeks submissive girl. Intelligence and humor a must. He agreed to be interviewed, then added, Will still put the moves on you, obviously. Good, I thought, staring with boredom and resentment at my phone. He turned out to be a gentleman, saying he has used the service to make friends as much as he has to facilitate his BDSM fetish. I am not into BDSM, but I did feel happy when Ben kissed me and then when he text-messaged me a week later and called me darling.

I talked to a European who uses Tinder while traveling for work. I noticed when I was in the Midwest that girls were far more approachable, he said. They returned messages more. I talked to a tech consultant in Los Angeles who uses Tinder to enliven a dull or overly male social situation—like the last bachelor party he went to in Las Vegas. The guys met some women on Tinder. People coupled off. People got naked. Mayhem ensued. I asked about the women—were they, er, from Las Vegas? They weren’t locals, and they weren’t hookers, he said. They didn’t have to be: The above experience is what people are optimizing for when they’re single in Vegas, he says. He said he has friends that start firing up the app as soon as they land at the airport.

One canard is that Tinder disproportionately favors the beautiful. I swiped one guy, David, to the right because his photo made me laugh. He had taken a common trope—the painfully serious selfie—and turned it into a joke.

He messaged a few days later and turned out to be the most overtly sexual person I chatted with on Tinder. Like most heterosexuals, I have spent years watching my gay friends cruise apps like Grindr with muted fascination. How easy it was for willing men to have spontaneous sex with strangers! What was wrong with women like me, equally willing and desirous, at least in theory, but in practice so finicky and inhibited? The idea of a Grindr for straight people took hold in the heterosexual imagination, becoming a sort of holy grail. But it never seemed to work out. Blendr has a pretty sordid feeling to it. Bang With Friends was conceived drunkenly and ended in a lawsuit.

When Tinder appeared, its mimicry of Grindr’s location-based approach seemed to indicate that Grindr for straight people had finally arrived. Sean and Justin insist that that’s a mischaracterization. (Married people can use it to meet tennis partners!) But like most people, I know the difference between corporate skywriting and what humans are actually like. If Mormons in Utah are using Tinder to find husbands and wives, hedonists in New York are fulfilling their dreams of a futuristic mobile-phone-sex utopia.

I have already had what I would consider some pretty inappropriate thoughts concerning you so far, wrote David. He had used the service for casual sex before. My level of knowledge when it comes to sex, the psychology behind it all and lots of fun stuff is not something I hide. He said several women have taken advantage of his comfort and confidence to use me for sex and ask me to help them experience new things.

I told him I would be interested in meeting up…at some point. This was genuine. He wanted to meet up that night. When I said no, he asked why. I told him I had plans with friends. He offered to pick me up from the party I was going to. I wrote, No, I’m flattered but just want to hang out with friends tonight. He suggested we meet afterward. Not tonight, I wrote. He asked what the real reason was. I was guilty of making an overture I no longer wanted to keep, and things started feeling less like flirtation than unwanted pressure. After a certain point, I knew I would not be having casual sex with David.

I don’t agree with the Tinder founders, who say there isn’t a straight version of Grindr because girls aren’t wired that way—I know too many women who have used dating services for casual sex. Most mainstream dating companies downplay or ignore the use of their services for casual sex, the philosophy being that people who want that will find it. If casual sex is the main selling point, however, people who don’t want it will be alienated.

But sometimes one wishes the geniuses of the tech world would address certain problems even more directly. Beyond proving that users are real because they have a Facebook account, how could a dating app help a sexually adventurous woman both pursue casual encounters and reliably vet potential partners? How could it help her minimize the risk of rape?

I thought also of the party I was headed to, of the problems of creepiness that Tinder purported to solve. There’s creepiness, and then there’s the stigma of everyday loneliness and desire. But isn’t desperation one of the animating forces of life? I hoped my friends would not wait for the double opt-in, that they would creepily ask their crushes to be their Facebook friends, that they would stare at each other, and reveal their vulnerability, and make excruciating overtures that would be met with catastrophically embarrassing rejections. I went to my party, during which David texted twice—and once the next morning, and once the day after that, and twice the following Monday.

Sarah is the kind of person whose presence on an online dating site convinces everyone else that it’s normal to use it. She is a native New Yorker, 28 years old, beautiful and stylish, with a job at a tech company and a large network of friends and family in the city, and she’s immediately perceivable as a happy, well-rounded person. Like most people I interviewed, she has tried other dating sites—HowAboutWe, Grouper, OkCupid—but she was most drawn to Tinder because she doesn’t have to provide any information. She found most people’s self-presentation on OkCupid too calculated; also, you have to write so much. Tinder, she says, is just how you would go about things at a bar, and as easy as a Facebook like. You look at people, pick one who looks nice to you, then try to talk to him.

Sarah seems to prove the theory that Tinder’s success has to do with its appeal to women. Rather than a total inundation with messages by strangers on OkCupid, Sarah gets to choose whom she likes. Going through potential dates does not take up all her time—she can easily cover a few dozen in a span of minutes.

She joined Tinder in the middle of September. She was about to switch jobs and was winding things down at a previous job, so she would spend tons of time playing on Tinder. She was the first person I interviewed, though not the only one, who referred to using Tinder with the verb play. Contrary to some opinions, Sarah found she could tell more from a person’s photos than she could from a carefully thought-out website profile. A picture is something that’s taken in the moment, she says. You can’t change your smile. Her pet peeve is surfing photos. She always thinks they’re some kind of fake stock photo and always says no to people who have them. She also finds it weird when a guy lists his height: I think they’re lying to me.

She casts a broad net. If she feels indecisive, she swipes yes. She does not waste time trying to compose lyrical messages: Just say some bullshit. She also doesn’t like prolonged messaging: Just go out or not. To do anything else is a waste of one’s battery. (Tinder’s location-based tech drains phone batteries.) On the casual-sex question, she’s not interested. In the beginning, someone messaged her, So if you’re on Tinder you’re into stranger sex, when are we having stranger sex? Isn’t Tinder for that? She replied, Not for me, and blocked him. It’s not that she isn’t into casual sex. I have people that I can use in that way if I want to, she said. I don’t need to find five of them.

Sarah’s first four Tinder dates were fine, but the fifth was one of those minor miracles of coincidence that sometimes manifest themselves amid the throngs of New York City. One weekend night, Sarah went to a bar and got very, very drunk. The next morning, her friends asked her about the guy whose number she got. What guy? she asked. Her memory was foggy. Her friends were appalled—only the best-looking guy in the bar! She had no memory of the event. She went on Tinder, swiping despondently. She resumed a chat she’d been having with a man whose photos were cute-ish, whom she had swiped to the right despite the presence of one weird artistic selfie that made the guy look like kind of a douchebag. They chatted with the usual banalities: Hey and How’s your day? and How’s your weekend? He asked for her number. She gave it to him. Then the magical moment: I have something weird to tell you, he said. He had not been sure until she gave him the proof—her number was already in his phone. It was the guy from the previous night. When I met her, they had gone out five times in two weeks.

Katherine and Eli, the older woman and the younger man, met at what he remembers as a weird, kind of fancy bar that’s in some kind of labyrinth.

Despite the intensity of their texting, they did not start making out right away. Instead, they talked. They shared their recent sexual histories, their past sexual histories, their addiction problems. It seemed like a fair thing to do, says Eli. Maybe it wasn’t sexy, but the theme of it was more intimate, like I need to know you better as, like, a safety thing.

They went to her place. They had sex. It was great. (Both parties confirmed this.) Then they had sex again. He left after midnight, because he had to work in the morning. That they haven’t met again is more because they live inconveniently far from each other. I might not go out to Bushwick, where he lives with his roommates, says Katherine, but I think our paths will cross again in one way or another.

I ask Eli if he is looking for a girlfriend. He says he would like a partner, sure, but that he still wants to meet people, that he’s interested in polyamory. He attributes his flexibility to how he was raised, in a home where acceptance of sexual diversity was seen as the enlightened political position. I’m definitely queer, in a sense, he says. In the sense of being way more open-minded to anything.

Eli is pursuing a sexual narrative that doesn’t end in closure, that doesn’t bear the expectations of gendered rituals. And whether it’s for sex or just for meeting people, maybe Tinder will be the app for the never-ending present, for the idea of one’s life not as culminating in a happy ending but a long series of encounters, sexual or otherwise. When I watched the founders of Tinder giving interviews, every reporter they spoke with seemed to ask how many marriages had resulted. After talking to people about their experiences, I realize that to think about marriage is to completely miss the point of Tinder. The app is about the world around you, the people in your immediate vicinity, and the desires of a particular moment.

Eli really likes Tinder. He considers it to be the most honest form of online dating. He loves the feeling of scoring, a high without consequences. When I met him, he had just had an encounter he called awful, but that was, in its own way, a kind of dream.

She messaged at 10 P.M. on Thanksgiving night. She was a woman with whom he had transitioned from Tinder to text messaging, but this posed a problem: He could not remember who she was, what she looked like, and worst of all, her name. He got on a train anyway. He arrived at a glossy doorman building in Lower Manhattan. She had not yet arrived home, which meant Eli called and got her voice mail, from which (with relief) he learned her identity before she arrived. It turned out she’s one of the ones who are on Tinder, and I’m like, Why are you talking to me, I’m a chubby Jew, my teeth are yellow because I drink coffee, and you’re very successful and pretty.

But the night went downhill from there. They undressed and kissed and got into bed together, but they didn’t connect. He spent the night, though she didn’t feel like having sex. She talked really fast and mentioned her intention to wean herself off Adderall. Eli felt like perhaps she was disappointed in him, that he failed to meet her expectations. He left in the morning. I ask if the encounter depressed him. He thinks for a minute, tilts his head to the side, then says no: At the end of the day, I got to see her naked.

1.Obviously these people requested fake names.

Emily Witt’s (@embot) Future Sex, a survey of female sexuality in America, will be published in 2015.

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